Word: nikolai
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...accused politician is none other than Yegor Ligachev, 68, the ruling Politburo's leading conservative. His accusers are Telman Gdlyan and Nikolai Ivanov, government prosecutors who specialize in rooting out official corruption in central Asia...
...departing Old Guard, dubbed the "dead souls" in a reference to Nikolai Gogol's 19th century novel, read like a Who's Who from the time of Leonid Brezhnev. Included were a former President, a former Prime Minister, five marshals, six generals and a portfolio of onetime Politburo members. What's more, they had "requested" to resign in an extraordinary statement that expressed "unanimous support for the political course of our dear party." As Gorbachev explained to the plenum, "One generation of party members has naturally to replace another...
...state propagandists, whose mission it is to turn out the unending stream of statues of Lenin (with benign and resolute features that grow more Asiatic the further east they go) for public places from Minsk to Irkutsk. Many an unofficial artist finds himself in the predicament of Nikolai Filatov, whose large canvases -- a fervent compost of '50s-style abstract expressionism and broken-up cubofuturist planes -- are beginning to sell in the West, so he has hard currency but nowhere to paint. To get studio space in Moscow on an official basis, you must belong to the Artists Union...
...sense that the artist has a prophetic mission in society has haunted Russian culture since the 19th century. That heavy burden crushed novelist Nikolai Gogol, who was never able to equal his masterpiece Dead Souls. It ultimately led other writers, like Leo Tolstoy, away from art and into dogmatic polemics. The weight can be felt today on the Soviet artistic community. But the essential paradox of glasnost is that when cultural leaders raise their voices, they can no longer be heard above the excited babble of an entire nation learning to speak for the first time...
...least two institutions are dedicated to examining the bitter truth about the past. A Politburo commission formed by Gorbachev has rehabilitated such figures as Nikolai Bukharin, shot after a frame-up show trial in 1938. A rapidly growing group called Memorial aims to build a monument to Stalin's victims and establish an archive and research center to document his crimes...